A display photographs and texts from the years 1919 to 1939 at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw
In the two millennia between ancient Israel and its modern rebirth, Jews never enjoyed as much political autonomy as they did in Poland, a land that centuries later would become intrinsically linked to the Holocaust.
The story of this great flourishing of political and cultural life is part of a 1,000-year history told in a visually striking new museum, the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which opens its long-awaited core exhibition to the public today amid days of celebrations.
The Polish and Israeli presidents will attend, along with Polish Holocaust survivors who helped create this memorial to the lost world of their ancestors.
Polin is Hebrew for Poland, and also means “rest here,” a reference to a story Jews told themselves about their arrival in Poland in the Middle Ages: that they found favor from the rulers and were allowed to dwell there in tranquility. The result was centuries of a flourishing Yiddish-
speaking civilization that made important contributions to Polish and world culture before being nearly wiped out by Nazi Germany.
“The Holocaust has cast a shadow onto this great civilization and the generations of Jews who lived in Eastern Europe before the Second World War, as if those centuries of life were little more than a preface to the Holocaust,” museum director Dariusz Stola said. “But that is absurd. This museum stresses that 1,000 years of Jewish life are not less worthy of remembrance than the six years of the Holocaust.”
Poland, in a union formed in the 16th century with Lithuania called the Commonwealth, became one of Europe’s largest and most ethnically diverse territories. Jews benefited from tolerance and a large degree of self-governance granted by the rulers, growing into the world’s largest Jewish community. Today 9 million of the world’s 14 million Jews can trace their ancestry to Poland.
Despite their once-significant presence, memory of the Jews all but disappeared from public discourse in Poland in the communist era, leaving postwar generations largely unaware that their country was once a multiethnic land where Jews and other religions lived in relative peace, even avoiding the religious wars that devastated other European lands.
Poland’s prewar population of 3.3 million Jews was reduced to 300,000 by Adolf Hitler’s genocide, while communist-era persecution drove most of those survivors away. Today there are fewer than 30,000 Jews in Poland, though the community is again growing.
In the postwar decades, “Polish history didn’t speak of Jews. It spoke of cemeteries, of the Holocaust, of the ghettos. … It spoke exclusively of death,” said Piotr Wislicki, who heads a Jewish historical association that raised $48 million for the exhibition. “And in the eyes of the world, Poland was just one big cemetery.”
The museum is now part of a broader attempt by Poland’s leaders and elite to reclaim that pluralism, an ethos that took root after Poland threw off communism 25 years ago. Vanessa Gera, Warsaw, AP
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